Alice Walker and Colm Toibin, and Their Trail of Words

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Colm Toibin and Alice Walker have seen their books take on new lives, either on the screen or on stage.CreditPeter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

By Philip Galanes

Jan. 23, 2016

One of the special pleasures of movies and plays based on great novels is the way they lead us back to their literary roots. Playing the images and emotions from stage or screen against the ones in our head while reading the original creates a doubled experience.

Make that a triple in the case of “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker. Ms. Walker, 71, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her novel in 1983. Two years later, the book — about the abuse and spiritual triumph of a black woman in the sharecropping American South — was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg and featured the screen acting debuts of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.

Twenty years later, the novel became a Tony Award-winning musical, which is now enjoying a Broadway revival and rapturous reviews. Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic for The New York Times, called it “miraculous” and “a glory to behold.”

The acclaimed Irish writer Colm Toibin (pronounced COL-um toe-BEAN), 60, is enjoying a parallel success with his novel “Brooklyn,” about a naïve Irish girl who immigrates to the United States in the 1950s. The film adaptation was released in November to stellar reviews for its moving subtlety. Last week, it received three Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture, and has returned Mr. Toibin’s 2009 novel to the best-seller lists.

The writers met for lunch recently at Chez Panisse, the legendary farm-to-table restaurant run by the chef Alice Waters in Berkeley, Calif., not far from where they each wrote much of their books. Over polentina soup and fried sole (for Ms. Walker) and butter lettuce salad and tagliatelle with mushroom ragù (for Mr. Toibin), followed by a moist almond cake with Chantilly cream for dessert, the pair discussed the afterlives of their novels, giving voices to characters who haven’t historically enjoyed them, and their personal quests to find a home in the world.

Philip Galanes: So were you thrilled when Hollywood came calling?

Alice Walker: Not at all! I put them off. I finally had some balance in my life.

PG: And a best seller on your hands.

AW: I’d just said to my partner and daughter, “I’m all yours.” Then Steven [Spielberg] and Quincy [Jones] came to see me. I saw how patiently Steven had read the book and how it moved him. We all hope that we write for the world, not just that little corner that’s like us. But for someone like Steven — so unlike me and everyone in the story — to feel what I was offering, that was unusual. And Quincy understood the culture immediately. He said, “Celie is the blues.” Perfect! I felt safe in their hands.

Colm Toibin: I was at a book fair in New York, which can be oddly social. I was chatting with a dealer friend from London, and he introduced me to this woman from New Zealand who had come specifically to meet me. But she didn’t know I was me until I had walked away. So she chased after me and said, “My name is Finola Dwyer.” You know that moment when you look at someone and think, “I like you”?

AW: I sure do.

CT: She’d made [the film] “An Education” with Carey Mulligan, which I liked very much. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay. So I asked, “If I do this, would Nick write the screenplay?” I hadn’t thought of it before that minute, but I knew if Nick wrote it, it would work.

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Alice Walker wrote “The Color Purple,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

‘I had seven brothers and sisters, and not one of them became the person they should have been — because of poverty, because of racism, because of poor diet and drugs, because of the war.’ ALICE WALKERCreditPeter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

PG: You didn’t want to write it yourself?

CT: Not at all. But I knew I wanted a novelist to write it.

AW: They asked me to write the screenplay for the movie. And I wrote one from my bed. I had a terrible case of Lyme disease. But I knew I wasn’t well enough to work on it and go down to L.A. and raise my child and make a living, so they got someone else, who was always at my door: “What does this mean? What does that mean?” But it was O.K. because it had to be.

CT: And I soon realized that nobody wanted me around. Nick was doing it. He didn’t ask any questions, never even got in touch. And I thought that was perfectly reasonable.

PG: You didn’t feel protective?

CT: It was the only way it could work. He took the central spine of the novel — the romantic story and the immigration, the two things that really matter — and left other things off to the side. But he wasn’t trying to tell a new story. He was faithful to the book within the constraints of film.

PG: And both movies turned out so well. But let’s turn to the bizarre reception for “The Color Purple” film. Amid strong reviews and box office came furious attacks — full hours on “Phil Donahue” and editorials and talk shows — about how the story of this one black woman was a broadsided attack on black men. Why, then, did you agree to the Broadway adaptation?

AW: I am remarkably stubborn. And I believe in the truth. So, once I got through the Lyme disease period, I thought adding music to the story might be good. When people are fiercely opposed to things politically, music can help reach them, soften them. This story is one that we need, as a kind of medicine. We are a sick culture, and I believe that art can help.

PG: But the story is also personal. You are the eighth child of a sharecropper — not so different from your heroine.

AW: Absolutely. I came through a very difficult life for a reason. I had seven brothers and sisters, and not one of them became the person they should have been — because of poverty, because of racism, because of poor diet and drugs, because of the war. The boys went off to the Army.

PG: I remember my shock at first reading “Purple.” I thought, “My God, sharecropping was just slavery, Part 2.”

AW: It was slavery where you could work for many white men, instead of one, and no health benefits. At least in slavery, the owners tried to keep you healthy enough to work. But with sharecroppers, they didn’t even bother. And the thing to remember is that all history is current. The last time I was in Africa, I saw a plantation overseer getting on a small plane with a bullwhip, on his way to someplace growing cotton. All these things are continuing somewhere. There is no rest.

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Colm Toibin wrote “Brooklyn,” which has enjoyed success as a book. The film adaptation, released last November, has drawn acclaim as well.

‘I hope that when you see the young Lithuanian girl at the cash register in the supermarket looking really sad one day, you know it’s for good reason: She’s missing home.’ COLM TOIBINCreditPeter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

CT: When I was writing “Brooklyn,” Ireland had become very prosperous. And people were arriving there, but Ireland wasn’t ready for it. Now the history is so clear that we Irish went to many countries and made ourselves at home. You’d think that when the Poles or Nigerians or Chinese arrived in Ireland, the Irish would be open with welcome. But it wasn’t true.

PG: Both of you are pretty dedicated nomads.

AW: I am a devout wanderer.

PG: And so are the heroines in your novels, searching for a safe home in the world. Alice’s Celie is raped and beaten down by men in positions of trust, and Colm’s Eilis is torn by homesickness, always longing for the place she isn’t. Is that search universal?

AW: Definitely. I sometimes think it’s having grown up as the daughter of sharecroppers. That pattern of having to move from one shack to another — after the family has been exploited for its labor. It’s in the rhythm of my being. Now, I have places here and places there. I go from one to the other. I want to feel that the planet is my home, but I know there are parts of the planet where I’m really not wanted, as Colm was saying.

CT: I had to be careful not to preach about that in the book, just tell the story. But I hope that when you see the young Lithuanian girl at the cash register in the supermarket looking really sad one day, you know it’s for good reason: She’s missing home. I hoped the book might contribute to that public debate.

PG: How much of your own lives contributed to these coming-of-age novels? Colm, you grew up in a rural village in Ireland, like your heroine. Your mother was also a widow.

CT: My father died when I was 12. The town had about 6,000 people. And over several months, a lot of them came to our house. They came every night. There was no telephone, so you never knew who was coming. Just a knock on the door. My job was to answer it and lead the people into the house. They would sit and have tea, and I’d watch like a hawk. They’d say how sorry they were at the beginning and the end, but the middle was something else — ordinary stories about things that happened in town, you know?

AW: I can see it perfectly.

CT: One night, a woman came and talked on and on about her daughter having gone to Brooklyn. I can see her to this day: her scarves and her hat. Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. And after she left, somebody said that a man in Brooklyn had fallen so in love with the daughter — “mad about her,” as my mother would have said — that he wouldn’t let her come back to Ireland unless she married him first. That’s all I knew. I had the story for 40 years. And I wrote it after a semester teaching in Austin, Tex., where I’d never felt as far away from home in my life. And when I went home, I really felt it. I thought, “I know what home is.” I found a way to tell the story because those feelings were so urgent.

AW: In my case, it was the terrible things I’d heard about my grandfathers, both of them, when I was 8 or 9 years old. They’d been so mean when they were young. They were fine by the time I knew them, decades later. It was an enormous puzzle: What happens to people?

PG: And it goes straight to the Phil Donahue craziness about your male characters, no?

AW: Of course. Now I know about the hardships that my father, my grandfather, all of the black men went through. The women too, of course, but I was fascinated by the men. They were totally oppressed by the culture. Lynchings were frequent. I used to wonder why my father always had this look when he went off to town that said, I might not be back. He had to behave in this servile way. And if the white people were drunk, they would abuse him anyway.

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Alice Walker and Colm Toibin sharing thoughts over lunch at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., not far from where they each wrote much of their books.CreditPeter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

PG: And that was their model for treating women?

AW: Enslavement culture was their only model for 300 years. They would be looking at the behavior of brutal white overseers. Did you realize that they used to behead people in our country? They put heads on spikes and lined the rivers to keep enslaved people in complete terror. But it was only later that I knew this. My parents hadn’t permitted me to understand it as a child; they never talked about it.

CT: Both of our country’s histories are filled with silence.

PG: And so are your novels. Colm’s line: “The one thing the Lacy women could not do is say out loud what they were thinking.” And Alice’s: “Don’t you never tell nobody but God. It would kill your Mammy.”

CT: As a novelist, this is really interesting. Because what a novel can do is show the distance between what’s being said and what’s being felt. Then the reader starts to see: “Oh, my God, they’re not talking about it, but I know what they’re thinking.” It’s very hard to do in a play or film. But in a novel, you can literally show the two things beside each other. And the drama is the distance between what’s to be spoken of and what’s not to be mentioned again.

PG: When your father was ill, your mother left you, as a little boy, with relatives for a long stretch. Did you ever talk about that with her, or would that be one of the moments you’re talking about?

CT: I never did. Does this happen to you when you’re working, Alice? You think you’re making something up, and suddenly, you realize: Oh no, here it comes again: the abandonment. It’s coming up all over again.

AW: All the time. I’ve decided to work with it until I don’t need it anymore. No repression, no regret. Here it is. What can I make of it this time?

PG: Like the story of your grandfather, shooting at your grandmother with a rifle. …

AW: And only missing because he was dead drunk. They told that as a funny story. Can you believe it? I’m sure that’s why my brother shot me in the eye when I was 8.

PG: How old was he?

AW: Ten. Poor thing. But everything that happens to us teaches us, if we are open to it. And eventually life will open you. What I learned from that moment in refusing to tell on him. …

PG: What?!

AW: No, no, no. I was loyal. He would have been beaten by my parents if I’d told. So, my other brother and I conferred and came up with another story. And what I learned from that moment has served me so much better than what happened to my brother. I don’t think he ever cared, and his life was like that. He died, later, of cocaine and anger and frustration. He never apologized, so I’ve had to work with it forever. But I try not to cling to the things that are devastating.

PG: What do you cling to instead?

AW: There was a tree growing out beyond the porch. I was lying in bed. And as I gradually lost sight in that eye, the last thing I saw was that tree. And I love trees.